“Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States related to the public debt.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section proposes a constitutional amendment that would require total outlays of the Government of the United States to not exceed total receipts at any point in time unless any excess is financed exclusively by debt issued under the amendment. It would set authorized debt initially at 105 percent of outstanding debt on the amendment’s effective date and prohibit any increase above that amount unless approved by a simple majority of the legislatures of the several States within 60 calendar days after Congress publicly refers a single-subject measure proposing the increase. It would require the President to enforce the debt limit whenever outstanding debt exceeds 98 percent of the limit by publicly designating expenditures for impoundment in an amount sufficient to keep debt within the limit, with the impoundment taking effect 30 days later unless Congress adopts an alternate impoundment of the same or greater amount by concurrent resolution. It would make any debt issued above the limit void and the President’s failure to designate or enforce the required impoundment an impeachable misdemeanor. It would also require a two-thirds roll call vote of each House of Congress for any bill imposing a new or increased general revenue tax, while exempting bills that create a new end-user sales tax replacing all existing federal income taxes and bills reducing or eliminating an exemption, deduction, or credit under an existing general revenue tax. It defines key terms, including “debt,” “outstanding debt,” “authorized debt,” “impoundment,” and “general revenue tax,” and provides that the amendment would take effect immediately upon ratification and be self-enforcing.